The forum may have to be disabled for now

[hilary]

Sorry, people. The board is breaking down so badly it keeps threatening to bring down not just this site, but all sites hosted on the same server. Needless to say, my web hosts are not happy, and are threatening to turn off all cgi scripts on my account. I have asked them just to turn off this board's scripts instead if they need to.

Meanwhile I've already turned off email notification, and please could you not click the links containing 'show.cgi' in any notification emails you already have? As apparently now that script, as well as the date/keyword search, is going fubar.

I don't know what's possessed it to (profanity filter intervenes here) so badly. Maybe it's throwing a tantrum at all this talk of being replaced?

I'll try to keep things running to some degree.
Ugh.

[hilary]

The web host have moved the site to a new server that should be more resilient. However, they have still asked me not to re-enable anything that has caused problems in the past. So that means the forum'll be without search and without email notification until such time as we can upgrade to more stable software.

Hopefully this'll be possible before too long. I'll keep you posted.

[pakua]

Hi Hilary,

Just curious... speaking as a programmer, things have been running fine for a long time, now suddenly the search and email notification cause problems? How can that be, unless there were changes somewhere?

[hilary]

The search function had caused the same problem once before. It's just because it is searching a lot of text files. Of course the files get steadily bigger and it gets steadily more likely to go wrong. (I guess someone's browser times out calling the script and it is somehow left running. Or something.)

Actually this problem can be solved within Discus (almost certainly) by changing to MySql. But that doesn't connect with the email notification thing. It's not the notification itself that caused the problem, but - wait for it - show.cgi. The links in the notification emails are
onlineclarity.co.uk/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?330/6297
instead of
onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_community/messages/330/6297.html
... just to stop link wrap breaking the link. And afaik that's the only thing that script does - just redirect. But after search.cgi had eaten 60% of the memory and crashed the (shared) server, and board-newmessages.cgi had had another 12% - and each time the long-suffering webhost had terminated the process - then I had a somewhat curt email from them saying that now two instances of show.cgi had crashed the server again. Goodness knows how. (This was when the web host started to talk about removing all cgi access. You can understand why.)

Actually I wanted to upgrade to Vbulletin anyway, eventually. It has a lot more features that I want to use on the admin side, as well as more for users. I'd just planned to do it all a bit more slowly and gracefully, and with fewer 500 errors.

In theory I could restore search by changing to MySql (and negotiating very politely with the nice web host). But then I would need to convert it back to flat text before we could make the export/import to Vbulletin, so it hardly seems worth the hassle (and risk of breaking something).

We - Ewald, bless his boots, and I - hope to make the transfer in a week's time if all goes well. Watch this space...

By the way, what kind of programming do you do?

[jerryd]

Im Lucky to turn on the Puter.....grins and much good luck..

[pakua]

Hi Hilary,

From reading your description of the problem, it sounds like their software is buggy and doesn't handle all situations. One would think they would want to fix the problem.

I write software for an IBM iSeries, which is more or less mainframe type system, which means I'm not much help in the pc world, I'm afraid.